Twist of Fate Paige Pagan I let out a hollow breath and my shoulders hunch over as my chest heaves. My mouth remains open and I’m not sure whether I want to yell or cry, but neither comes out. The right side of my heart throbs and I’m forced to clutch at my chest but to no avail, the left side immediately throbs after reaching a crescendo in my ears. Sweat beads travel down my spine and numb every area they surpass. My heartbeat is accelerating now, but my body is frozen to this spot where so many lives have already changed. Everything becomes slow motion. All the people running away from the corner deli are treading through quicksand and all the cars suddenly run out of gas at the same time, coming to a halt on their last fumes. In a blur, the man in red falls back as he’s hit on the right, then on the left. The two shots are ringing in my ears, replaying the scene in my mind. I bring my hands up to cover my ears and close my eyes tightly. When I open them a second later the weapon is being withdrawn and I feel myself shiver, my arms become covered in goosebumps. I mechanically shake my head from side to side, inching backwards with my hands reaching behind me, ready to break my trip. My bottom lip trembles and perhaps a slight no escapes my agape mouth. As the man in blue standing before the fallen body rotates to look behind him, his eyes slowly follow and meet mine from across the street, behind the staircase leading up to the train station. For a minute, everything disappears and it’s just him and I looking into each other’s souls and cringing. I stagger and clutch onto the railing at the bottom of the staircase. My legs feel like steel, much too heavy for my petite frame and impossible to carry me away from this notorious scene. I break our stare when my eyes dart from his to the body lying on the ground in front of him. Deep red blood begins to color the grey sidewalk and expands outwards creating a pool encircling this Bloods body. The bright red shirt he’s wearing is drenched and turns almost black, and I momentarily wonder if his dark blood reflects a dark soul. Shouts from the three Crips running down the block are reverberating in my ears, “RUN, RUN!” I see him running across the street straight in my direction. My silent tears begin to turn into heavy sobs when I hear him yell back to the three men, “THAT’S MY DAUGHTER!” “What are you doing out here? I told you to stay home!” He yells as he grabs both my shoulders. “What are you doing here?” he shakes me. I continue to cry in a loud and uncontrollable hysteria. I can’t even manage to croak out a single word. He grabs my hand and tries to jerk me forward, but my feet are glued to this spot. “Siobhan lets go! We have to go!” He’s yelling in my face. I look at him and see his bloodshot hazel eyes, the same eyes I’ve inherited. “Siobhan!” I hear him repeat my name over and over. Is he actually repeating it or is his voice just stuck in my head? He’s not saying it the way he usually does. He spits out his spearmint gum and the next thing I know I’m cupped in his arms like when I was young. He’s running and I think I’m in shock. Everything gets blurry and then the scene before me becomes pure white. Am I dying? I think I should say a prayer before I go. Allah, please… “Are you insane? How could you do that in front of her? How could you do that in front of the whole neighborhood?” “I didn’t know she was there. I told her to stay home. No one is this neighborhood will dare cross me.” “You know she’s been worrying ever since you came home.” “She’s fifteen, that’s not her place to worry. Maybe if you were worried about her and actually acted like a mother, she would’ve stood home.” “Don’t you dare turn this on me Abel. If anyone has caused her trauma it's always been you.” My heavy eyelids slowly open at the sound of my parents’ bickering but I can only keep them narrow. I already know without having to look at them that my eyes are swollen, they feel like they do when you wake up after having a long and hard cry and then falling asleep right after. I swallow hard and lick my chapped lips, I feel like I haven’t had a sip of water for days. Their arguing is getting louder now and I feel my temples begin to ache. There’s never much communication that I witness between my parents except when they’re blaming each other for their own faults. It’s as though they’re in a competition to prove who’s the worst parent but the truth is that they’re both absent. Dad is physically absent when he gets thrown in jail time after time and mom is mentally absent when she enters into her episodes and checks out of reality altogether. Both forgetting that they have a daughter. I look from my place on the loveseat in the living room towards the small area between my room and the bathroom that I painted with different Islamic motifs. I colored the off-white background of the back wall with the image of my pink and gold tasbih beads1 that has a thread extending from it of the familiar crescent moon and adjacent star. Next to that is the image of the dome of my masjid2, turquoise with golden accents and a white spiral reaching towards Jannah3. The image of the cover of my Quran draws my eyes next, baby pink with the inscription of the first surah on the front. My orange and yellow prayer rug lies on the floor facing towards the wall. 1 Islamic prayer beads. 2 Islamic word for mosque. 3 Paradise, equivalent of Heaven. I gasp and shift my eyes to the cable box in front of me to see the time. I missed Asr4. I swing my legs over and when my feet touch the floor, I spring up but immediately fall back down as black spots form before me and my vision becomes fuzzy. “Siobhan,” my dad says when he notices I’m awake. He sprints over to the loveseat and crouches down beside me. He says it in his normal lilting voice and I feel comforted. I like that my dad is the only person that ever says my full name all the time, it has become something that belongs to only him and I. While everyone else calls me Siob, he always says Siobhan, turning the rough b at the end of Siob soft as it mingles with the elongated h. I look into his eyes when he becomes leveled with me and smile at their return to a shade below emerald green like mine. The outer rim of his irises are encircled with a golden honey color, exuding a twinkle that has become a part of him only at his best. With that thought, the memories begin flooding back. I sigh and feel my eyes begin to water. “You know you shouldn’t have been where I was. You didn’t listen to me,” he scolded. “I…” phlegm gathered in my throat, I swallowed hard again and cleared it away, “I didn’t want you getting into trouble. You’ve only been back for a week and I need you here with me,” I said looking from him to my mother and then back at him again. He stood quiet for a minute and let his head fall. When he looked back up at me his eyes were glassy and his golden tint was tarnished, embodying a sorrowful beauty. His features were soft, like the dad I always knew. He sniffed back a tear and said, “You know Siobhan, you’re old enough to know that sometimes we have to make a choice that we don’t want to make, and we have to do things we don’t want to do. This isn’t the life I envisioned for my daughter. But I try everything in my power to make sure that you have a roof over your head, clothes on your back and food in your stomach. Do I always do it in the right way? Of course not. But I find a way to make it happen regardless. And I would do anything for you. I’d give up my life for you. You know that.” I look away from his eyes, trying to hold back my tears. I’ve cried too much already. I set my gaze on the side of his arm and slightly smile at his tattoo. Spelled out in child letter blocks vertically is my name, his miracle child. He always tells me that it took him and mom ten years to conceive me and the doctors were doubtful if mom would ever get pregnant. Maybe it was Allah saying he needed more time to create someone that would be able to withstand this life. People say God only puts his strongest soldiers through the hardest wars, but he’ll never present us with anything we can’t handle.